You think that Uber’s interest in the Vancouver taxi trade is disruptive?

Just wait for the day when you’re hailing an autonomous cab on Robson Street.

In the opinion of the man who pioneered the use of a hybrid vehicle as a taxi, not only in Vancouver but in the entire world, that day, which is coming sooner than we think, “will mark the end of the entire taxi industry.”

Given Andrew Grant’s track record of predicting the future of the cab business in this town, that statement should keep cab companies up at night. Thing is, they already know it.

In 1982, Grant was one of the first Vancouver taxi drivers to use a voice pager to allow his growing list of clients to contact him directly instead of going through the dispatcher.

“But then I was spending a fortune in quarters at pay phones to contact them back, so I applied to the City of Vancouver for a mobile phone licence but was denied.”

He eventually did get a mobile phone in 1988. As a result, he drew 80 per cent of his business from private clients and just 20 per cent from dispatch.

In many ways, Grant had developed an Uber-like system decades before it came into being, only unlike that global disrupter, he operated as a legitimate and licensed cab.

Then, just over a decade later, Grant would be the guy behind a game-changer in the Vancouver taxi business. On Nov. 1, 2000, he bought a 2001 Toyota Prius hybrid, painted it yellow, put a fare box and radio in it and hit the road.

“Everybody thought I was crazy,” he says. “They said (the Prius) was too small to be a cab. I had people who would come up to the car and not get in it. They figured it was unsafe.

“The first question once we started driving away on electric-only power was, ‘Is this an electric car?’ ”

It wasn’t of course, but rather a gasoline-hybrid vehicle, and today the hybrid cab is ubiquitous, not only in Vancouver but in big cities around the world. As Grant envisions it, the first toe in the water of autonomous cabs will take place in Vancouver’s downtown core, and most probably will be a private fleet of just a handful of vehicles owned by a restaurant/nightclub consortium to serve their clientele and also their late-night staff when they get off shift.

He notes that, “people complain that they can’t get rides home to the West End or Coal Harbour after the bars close downtown on a Saturday night,” so he sees this as the first practical application of driverless, hired cars in the city.

Given that downtown Vancouver is on an island of sorts, it is an ideal small footprint to program the vehicles. Plus, traffic between midnight and 6 a.m. is sparse, making it all the easier for driverless cars to operate.

Grant says there’s also the elegant beauty of a driverless car driving a bunch of lubricated partygoers home.

“A lot of cab drivers don’t like doing the downtown weekend graveyard shift because they don’t want to deal with drunks in their cab,” he explains, adding that in a worst-case scenario, the autonomous vehicle owner can just “hose it out at the end of the shift.”

And as all goings on in the cab will be caught on camera, any damage that occurs from passenger vandalism will merely be billed to the customer’s credit card. On that note, the occupants will be locked in the car until the bill has been paid using the on-board card-reader.

All of which leads us back to Uber in a way.

If municipal and provincial government officials think they have a job on their hands of figuring out how to regulate the car-sharing app that has taken most of the world’s big cities by storm — and in doing so outraged the long-established and amazingly profitable taxi companies and drivers — how are they going to get their heads around regulating driverless cars that are summoned by passengers on their smartphone using an app and paid for using a credit card reader installed in the cab?

The cab driver and dispatcher will have gone the way of the rotary dial phone, but there will still be cab owners, only they’ll be sitting at a bank of monitors somewhere watching live video feeds from their cabs’ on-board cameras along with GPS real-time readouts of where their cabs are in the city.

Once this private autonomous car system for bar clients and staff is proven in the real world for a year or so, Grant says the floodgates will open in terms of individuals and companies looking to put autonomous vehicles on the road to serve the public. Translation: taxis.

Likewise, the small downtown footprint will be expanded to include the rest of Vancouver, the North Shore and other municipalities in Metro Vancouver, much as the Car2Go car-sharing program was rolled out in the city over past couple of years.

It started in the central Vancouver area and has expanded outward.

On the subject of Car2Go, it isn’t difficult to imagine the company having autonomous smartcars parked throughout Metro Vancouver to be used by members in exactly the same way as the current ever-expanding fleet of white-and-blue smartcars.

Extrapolate such a scenario a little further, and the argument can be made that not only will the traditional taxi business be a thing of the past, so will the automotive industry as we know it today.

Think about it. According to industry observers, and just by looking at the billions of R&D dollars being spent by most every automaker in pursuit of the autonomous car, you’ll be able to replace your existing car with an autonomous car in the coming decade or so. But in a world where an autonomous Car2Go vehicle, or any car-sharing vehicle for that matter, is parked just around the block from your house and can be called to your house at the push of a few smartphone buttons, why would you buy an autonomous vehicle in the first place?

Will there be massive underground parking garages on the edge of suburban communities filled with autonomous vehicles of all shapes and sizes awaiting an app-prompt to take Johnny to his hockey game, or the family out to dinner and a movie?

In less than a week, Abbotsford recording artists Hedley went from touring Canada with two supporting acts and a popular new album to pariahs ensnared in allegations of sexual misconduct. On Monday, accusations that band members Jacob Hoggard, Dave Rosin, Tommy Mac and Jay Benison had engaged in sexual behaviour with teenage girls surfaced on Twitter […]

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I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.